By Robert J. Wiersema

Upon reflection, it seems that William Wordsworth was not only correct but prescient when he wrote, in his 1802 sonnet, “the world is too much with us.” It could be a motto for life in 2017. And Wordsworth wasn’t even on Facebook.

I know I’m not the only one to feel increasingly exhausted by the online world these days. Social media in particular lurches toward the toxic with a seemingly unabated enthusiasm. It’s not just the constant stream of news revealing the hatred and inhumanity lurking around us unseen for so long, or the trolls, or the Russian bots that may have tipped the results of last year’s U.S. presidential election. The onslaught is so relentless, so poisonous, it seems to reduce me to a frayed nerve.

Most days, I think I would be far better off if I just logged off for good.

One of the few reasons I don’t give up on social media altogether is the continuing presence of Jonathan Carroll.

An American writer who has lived in Vienna since the 1970s, Carroll specializes in a difficult-to-label melding of emotionally acute realism with varying degrees of the fantastic. His novel Outside the Dog Museum won the British Fantasy Award, and other books, including The Wooden Sea and White Apples, have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and other genre prizes – but Carroll doesn’t really write fantasy. His imagination veers toward magic realism, but that’s not quite it either. Some readers file him with slipstream authors, but that’s basically turned into a catch-all category for books and writers that don’t fit elsewhere. Ultimately, there’s no one else like him, and a Jonathan Carroll novel is always that rarest of reading experiences: a genuine surprise, filled with wonder, and apt to change how you look at the world.

.Subterranean Press

That approach carries over from Carroll’s fiction to his online presence. Carroll doesn’t write about the small triumphs or tragedies of his day, his breakfast or his evening plans. Rather, his feeds are a mindfully curated collection of photographs, poems by other writers, quotations (usually something either slightly off-kilter or surprisingly beautiful), all presented without comment or context. And then there are the written pieces: intimate and haunting glimpses into the writer’s mind, into the world around him, the people he meets – or only observes – and the way in which these elements interact, a soulful alchemy.

The Crow’s Dinner, Carroll’s new book, collects more than 500 pages of these pieces. It’s billed as an “essay collection,” but one suspects that’s simply for lack of a better term.

The pieces in The Crow’s Dinner are rarely more than a page or two long, sometimes only a paragraph, and typically revolve around a single experience or theme, building outward and inward simultaneously, vignettes accruing weight and significance through Carroll’s attention. There’s a strange sense of a Zen koan to many of the pieces, stories designed to lead the reader to enlightenment.

Sometimes the pieces are directly personal. The Drowned Angel, for example, recounts the afternoon when, at age 12, Carroll and a friend discovered the body of a young woman floating in the Hudson River, the same afternoon he first heard The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night,” and how those two events weave together in his psyche: “whenever I hear that wonderful sexy tune, the first thing that comes to mind is the moment by the river just after the boat sped by, sending its waves into shore and exposing for the first time the skull beneath my life’s skin.”

Even more powerful, however, are the pieces – the majority of them – in which Carroll witnesses, and reflects upon, the lives of others. One of the key defining aspects of Carroll’s work is its heart, the powerful empathy one experiences within his fiction. Clearly, that’s a result of how he sees the world. The Crow’s Dinner is rich in stories of senior citizens in cafes, of homeless kids in parks, of facades breaking down for the barest of moments, witnessed only by Carroll. It is a world of night streets, of failed love affairs, of mysterious shops and the magic of snow.

It brings to mind the unseen angels in Wim Wenders’S Wings of Desire, observing the citizens of Berlin, drawn to their emotional inner lives, seeing what others do not, absorbing their secrets.

The Crow’s Dinner is a rich feast, and one which should not be consumed whole. This is not a book for a single, concerted, cover-to-cover read. Rather, it should be picked up, and opened at random. Read a piece or two, and then put the book down, and go out into the world with new eyes. For just a moment, find the wonder in the faces and lives of others. If the world is going to be too much with us, we can at least change the terms of our engagement.

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